From the beginning we imagined that Broken Trust would be a movie. One of our goals for the thriller and the movie was to create a female protagonist in her 50s who would work successfully “in a man’s world.” We envisioned Julianne Moore playing Fitz.

Fitz is that woman for many reasons. First, she has always excelled at math and did her doctorate at Wharton in forensic accounting. She does high level financial analysis to support the SEC’s investigation into fraud, market manipulation and other illegal activities. While she is not the only woman to work in that area, her fifteen-year track record at the SEC speaks to her strength, commitment and ability to analyze complex financial situations. She is in her 50s and is in some ways just coming into her own power.

As we see in Broken Trust, she consistently takes the lead with Charles and Jamie, both of whom are strong, successful men used to being in charge. While they both want to protect their friend, they respect Fitz’s willingness to take risks and to put herself in the line of fire, as she does in Cayman when she goes to Kenmore’s office to get the final piece of data about when Hans, Valentina and Ramón are meeting with the attorney. She confronts Hans repeatedly at increasing risk to herself, highlighting her ability to act on her strong convictions.

Fitz is not a super hero. She is a flawed individual whose emotional scars interfere at times with her usual rational decision-making. When her personal and professional lives converge, both internal and external conflicts explode. We see that especially in her relationship with her father and with Charles. She finally recognizes that the mistakes she made regarding Chloe were based on false assumptions. That recognition is a major turning point in Broken Trust. Once she knows that Charles didn’t want the annulment, she finally confronts herself and her father, and takes responsibility for her decision to hide her pregnancy from everyone except her brother. It is her willingness to own her mistakes come what may that finally unlocks the personal power she has repressed for decades.

This is a story about three smart, successful people who were once fast friends in college and have now been thrust together again in an unlikely, multi-layered investigation with far-reaching international implications and billions of dollars at stake. One is a forensic accountant for the SEC, one beta tests hardware and software for the US Department of Defense and the UK Ministry of Defense, and the third is a wildly successful entrepreneur, software developer and venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

They get caught up in the hunt for a corrupt Swiss banker intent on finally unloading the last of the gold stolen by his father in World War II; a violent, narcissist leader of a Mexican drug cartel making his move to take over as the head of all cartels in Central America; and the daughter of a murdered Bulgarian arms dealer making the deal that will give her mother financial stability and get them both out of the increasingly unstable arms business.

The plot unfolds as financial crimes committed by insiders put common criminal activities to shame in a world where technology has increasingly insinuated itself into our lives to good and bad effects.

Meet the Authors

Thomas Maurin is the pen name of husband and wife writing team Bonnie B. Hartley, Ph.D., and Michael T. Hartley, CFP®. They both write non-fiction books and articles regarding financial and family business topics and have delivered talks on those subjects internationally over the last thirty years.